After a lot of quiet rumblings, it’s finally time for some solid news on the upcoming “Transformers: The Movie Ultimate Edition” DVD being released by Metrodome in the UK this summer!

The movie will be available in a two-disc set – while disc two will contain the original unaltered fullscreen movie, the real show is on disc one, where the movie is presented in a brand-new re-mastered widescreen format - a progressive PAL to PAL transfer made directly from the original film negative. As well as a 2.0 audio soundtrack, a carefully constructed 5.1 audio track has been created to accompany the movie – after the “Prime’s pop-gun” fiasco perpetrated by Magno Sound on Metrodome’s earlier “Transformers: The Movie Reconstructed” release, this track has been picked apart and put back together for the optimized 5.1 audio experience, sans unintrusive whipcracks and other crazy added sounds.

And how does the video image itself look? Well, first let’s compare it to “Reconstructed,” which peeled back the edges of the video to expose more animation, but suffered in the process. Here’s Devastator doing his thing, and Galvatron piloting his ship.

Looking hot, yes? But I think what more people want to know is, how does it compare to the recent 20th Anniversary offering by Sony available in Region 1? Well, let’s set Kup and Optimus Prime side-by-side to show it off (with some caps shamelessly borrowed from IGN.Com)…

Positively bursting with colour in comparison! And to finish it off, here’s Hot Rod in a four-way compare and contrast:

I'll wait to see it in motion. Then encoding is just as, if not more, important than the color correction.

Also, screen grabs that are taken by multiple sources should never be used as comparison material, especially when the caps are being recompressed at such small sizes. I'd love to see screen caps taken from all discs by the same machine, with each image at full size. I'm cautiously optimistic.

And I'm curious to see what special features are going to be on the set.